


Atlas

by maelidify



Series: Space Interludes [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Feelings, also ghosts or something, some vague artsy sex but mostly feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 12:57:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12818022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: “I,” she starts, and tries to strengthen her voice but there’s a crack in it, and that’s okay, John can bear her weaknesses. She looks around. The man is gone. She tries again: “I am being followed by a dokwocha. A ghost.”





	Atlas

**Author's Note:**

> This was finished up for the first day of memori week: post s4: the arc.

It is morning, or what passes for morning on the Ark, the skeleton of a sky ship that they’d returned to. It is morning, and Emori awakens with a tightness in her chest.  
  
Like someone gripping her heart in a tight fist. She tries to nudge John, whose arm is slung lazily around her bare waist, but she can’t move. Can’t budge or twitch or reach, even an inch.  
  
_John_ , she tries to say, but the word won’t pass through her lips.  
  
Someone is watching her.  
  
She can barely see from the corner of her eye, but someone is there. The faint shape of a man, wild brown hair. Something desperate in his eyes.  
  
_John_ she tries to say again, only she says it out loud this time, and suddenly she can move and her ribs are shaking against her belly, and her _niron_ is waking and saying, “Emori? What is it? What’s wrong?” all groggy and concerned.

“I,” she starts, and tries to strengthen her voice but there’s a crack in it, and that’s okay, John can bear her weaknesses. She looks around. The man is gone. She tries again: “I am being followed by a _dokwocha_. A ghost.”  
  
\---  
  
In the sky, it has been what would pass for three months on the ground. Three cycles of the moon, which is closer here, a bright orb. They’ve been hard months: Raven barks orders to Monty every day, Harper and John pour over old medical books, Bellamy teaches Emori and the Azgeda woman, Echo, how to read, and Emori tries to help Raven besides, enjoying the hum of machinery and Raven’s quick, steely company. When they aren’t all working, they are wandering the ship, trying to find clothing, rations, tech. Emori is particularly good at finding functional tech. John is good at making freeze-dried rations taste bearable. Bellamy confers with Raven on leadership decisions, and Emori sees him disappear with Echo sometimes, thinking no one notices.  
  
The first night-- the first time Bellamy and Raven had decided they needed to settle down, put down their tools, find rooms and rest-- had been strange. No rustle of wind, no voices, no birds or brooks. Metal silence. Emori heard the Azgeda pacing up and down the halls restlessly (the woman may have been a spy, but Emori could recognize anyone’s footfalls, even the sneaky ones), unable to acclimate to the machine they were in, gently rotating through space.  
  
It didn’t bother Emori. Not much. John moved in her that night, their motions full of relief and heartbeat and life, and she felt the ship moving with them, their strange home, their savior. She sometimes felt it had a heartbeat too, a soft thrum under the steel ground.  
  
The morning of the ghost, John takes her to Harper.  
  
“McIntyre,” he says by way of greeting. Harper is sitting at her desk, taking notes in a crammed notebook; Monty is away, and the bed is unmade. “You’ve been reading the psych books, right?”  
  
“John,” Emori says in warning, because she knows what that word means, _psych_ . It’s close to a term in her language that describes people who float away from their minds and never return to them, wandering through the trees forever.

“There’s a section on dreams,” he says, turning to her. They are holding hands, his right and her left, and he squeezes it reassuringly. The sensation in that hand has always been lacking, but it is reassuring nonetheless.  
  
“It wasn’t a dream,” she says, wishing it had been.  
  
“Emori, there’s no such thing as ghosts,” he says.  
  
“I don’t think you get to decide that.” She pulls her hand away and he bristles, but a moment later his shoulder is resting against hers, and she doesn’t pull away.  
  
Harper is leafing through a thick volume. “What happened?”  
  
“I woke up,” she starts, slowly. John raises his eyebrows encouragingly. “And I couldn’t move. Then I saw the… a man, watching me.”  
  
“Was he gone when you could move again?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Harper hums and flips to the back of the book for a moment, and then returns to the middle.  
  
“Sleep paralysis,” she announces. “‘A disorder characterized by immobility of the subject, often accompanied by frightening hallucinations and a perceived heaviness on the chest.’”  
  
John’s eyes say _I told you so._  
  
“Let me see the book?” Emori asks, and the other girl hands it over. The words are accompanied by an illustration of a sleeping woman with some sort of a beast hovering over her. Emori turns carefully to the words: she can make out a few, _frightening, dream, chest, often,_ and, further down, _brain, chemical, lobe, reaction, catalyst._ Punctuation and sentence structure are becoming easier, as well.  
  
“Why did it have to be him?” she wonders softly. John’s hand finds hers again, and she holds tight.  
  
\---

It happens again that night. That morning, rather. She is on her side, curled into John, and her eyes open, but she can’t unbend her knees, reach her arm out to wake her partner. A woman is watching this time. A thin woman with braids in her hair. Emori remembers her wide scared eyes, the endless lids when they’d closed. A slump of a thin shoulder. Almost analytically, she wonders if she’d be shaking if she could be.  
  
There is a knock on the door, and Emori sits up with a jolt. John stirs beside her.  
  
“Did it happen again?” he asks and she nods, leaning into him, feeling the comforting rise and fall of his bare chest.  
  
“Was it him again?”  
  
“I don’t have all day,” comes Raven’s impatient voice from outside the door. Cursing, John fumbles with the unlock button attached to a thin wire near the bed.  
  
“Thought you had five years,” he shoots back. Emori’s heart is still racing; she can’t partake in the banter.  
  
“Not to wait for you, I don’t,” the other woman says, walking in with a faint scrape. “Found some more books you might want to look at. These ones have some pretty gnarly surgical photographs.”

“Wonderful,” John says dryly.  
  
“It wasn’t him,” Emori says. She doesn’t mind that Raven hears. “It was a woman, this time.”

“What are you-- Emori, are you okay?” Raven turns to her for the first time since entering. “God, your face is pale.”  
  
“Sleep paralysis,” John explains.  
  
“Ghosts,” Emori says, her tone almost in agreement. And she explains; the man from the night before and the woman from this night, their careful eyes, the thin shine to their faces.  
  
Raven listens blank-faced, but Emori knows her mind is turning. It always is. And then there is a faint reaction, a flash of guilt or anger, and then it is gone.  
  
“Come on,” Raven says, standing up. “You need to get your mind on something else.”  
  
“They’ll still be there,” Emori says. “Tonight.”  
  
“Yeah, and? They can’t hurt you. Come on, help me radio-hunt.” In the past few weeks, Raven and Emori had been stripping each bedroom of the arc of personal tech, hoping to find useful parts. It baffles Emori that each member of Skaikru used to have their own radios, flashlights, music machines. It’s strangely haunting, searching their rooms and seeing their unmade beds.  
  
It is comforting, though. Scavenging is a remnant of her former life, after all.  
  
They have been working their way gradually through one section of the ship. She follows Raven into a room at a far end of this section, noting that Raven’s shoulders are tense. She’s been bearing the weight of this transition, her and Bellamy, anyway. Emori wonders just how much a few people can bear until it’s too heavy.  
  
This makes Emori think of a myth Bellamy taught her and Echo the other day. He had found a smattering of his old books, and they’d turned into his main means of teaching the written Skaikru language.  
  
“This was my one of my starter myths,” he told them with a slight smile. A haunting story. He read it aloud, and then had Echo struggle through it, and then Emori. Echo always came first. Something about her relaxed Bellamy, made him protective and self-assured.  
  
“Atlas,” Emori remembers saying, curving her tongue around the two syllables. In punishment for taking the wrong side in a divine war, a primordial god had been condemned to hold the sky up for all eternity.  
  
“People used to believe this?” she said, and Bellamy explained to her that the ancient Greeks didn’t take their stories literally. The flaws of their gods directly reflected the flaws of the human condition.  
  
“You guys have something good, you know,” Raven says, startling Emori out of her mythological reverie. She realizes she hasn’t been scavenging with any particular vigor. Her overturning of objects in the room has been thoughtless, dreamlike.  
  
“John and me?”  
  
“Yeah.” Raven sits down on a chair, one of those spinning ones they’ve found in a few rooms on the Arc. Unlike the other bedrooms they’ve explored, the room they’re stripping is an office of some sort, some sort of headquarters for a minor leader or delegate. “You’re going through some weird head crap, but you have someone you can talk to about it.”  
  
“About the dreams?” Emori spots a loose panel in the wall and starts to idly pry it with a knife she’d been given for this task.  
  
“No. About the guilt.”    
  
Emori looks at her sharply with that. Raven meets her gaze and lift an eyebrow in a slight challenge.  
  
“I have none of that to speak of,” she says lightly.  
  
“Bullshit. Did you find something over there?”  
  
“Yes. Hold on.” Emori attacks the panel with a bit too much force and it budges free. Inside is a mess of wires connected to a larger machine. “A radio,” she notes, studying its black angles.  
  
“Possibly connected to a larger system. Speakers, maybe, or even something to do with the intercomm.” Raven is peering over her shoulder now, brain fully ensconced in the language of technology once again. Sometimes Emori prefers when Raven is analyzing machines and not people. It’s much more accurate. “Nice,” she concludes. “We can use that.”

  
\---  
  
“Do you ever think about them?” Emori asks that night. All day, she’d felt something coiling around her. Anger is something she recognizes, an old friend. She knows how to shape it and use it. It isn’t a soft emotion. She wonders how many emotions she had to cut out of herself in the desert when she was a child.  
  
Anger, you can face directly. So Raven thought she felt guilty about something. Emori is capable of proving her wrong.  
  
“Who?” John asks. He’d just emerged from the small shower in their room, and he smells like the soap they’d been rationing since they found the supply of it. Clean and almost chemical. His hair is wet and she remembers bathing with him in muddy streams, the feeling of life and dirt everywhere. He sits down on the bed and she feels the shift of weight and moves toward him, taking his hand in her left. He strokes the rough skin idly and she doesn’t look at him.  
  
“The people you’ve killed. You told me about them when we first met.”  
  
“Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” He sighs and runs his other hand through his hair. “I told you I--”  
  
“Had your reasons. Don’t we all?” And she meets his eyes and smiles at him and realizes it’s a sad smile.  
  
“Hey,” he says softly, moving his hand to her face. “Hey, stop.”  
  
“I’ve had to do this my whole life,” she says. Her words are so soft she can barely hear them. Her voice creaks like a tree branch. “One after the other. For food, or shelter. I had to, John. I can’t feel it, I can’t feel anything. I had to.”  
  
“Emori--”  
  
“Do you ever see yours?” she asks and doesn’t recognize this feeling coiling in her gut, the one she thought was anger or the possession of a sly spirit. “What would they possibly have to say to us?”  
  
He holds her then, quick and tight, and she feels wetness slide down her neck from his eyes.  
  
“It’s so quiet here, John,” she says, and she’s crying too, staining the warmth of his shoulder. “It’s so quiet.”  
  
\---  
  
When they make love that night, it’s with a slow desperation like an aching wound. Like a bleeding animal. He pulls her toward him, hands shaking, and she wraps her hands in his hair and they make each other cry out. His thrusts, her sharp, slow kisses.  
  
When she comes in a dark wave, he kisses her mouth sweetly and softly. His hands are wrapped around her hands and he’s looking at her like he can’t look at anything else.  
  
“I don’t regret it,” he whispers. His eyes are blue planets in the dim light. Dark skies. There are things there he holds, things of unbearable weight. She'll hold them with him. “Neither should you.”  
  
“I love you, John,” she says, and means it. He continues to fill her with everything that he is, and cries out into her neck.  
  
_We’re guilty_ , she finds herself thinking, a strange, alien thought,  _we’re guilty. We’re safe_ .  
  
\---  
  
Halfway through the night, Emori opens her eyes. A different man is watching her. A _frikdriena_ with a calm, distorted face, and dried blood staining the unusual curves of his skull. She remembers how quickly she had slit his throat, and how the dark, unforgiving blood had stained her skin. She hadn’t given it a second thought until now. She couldn’t afford to think about any of them, on the ground.  
  
She cannot move, but she meets his eyes. _I’m sorry_ , she thinks, and _I had to do it._ The thoughts are equally true, equally heavy and strange. _I want you to leave now._ He stares back and doesn't leave.   
  
John begins to stir beside her, his arm warm around her bare waist, his skin soft and thrumming with life. She knows he’ll hold her until she wakes up.

**Author's Note:**

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>  I firmly believe Emori kicked the entire concept of guilt out of her system as a survival mechanism when she was like eight or something and that it would return in a very abstract way in order for her to understand it. Happy Memori week folks hahahahahahahaha I'll try to write something fluffy tomorrow.


End file.
